by David Hewson
Then Brendan Hanrahan had leaned over and whispered in his ear, the close, hoarse whisper of a man in the confessional. The words burned in Fosse’s brain. The rat scuttled across the floor in front of the altar once more. In his mind’s eye—and he knew this could not be real—Cardinal Michael Denney really did lie on the rack now, over a slow flame, like that of some country barbecue, grinning at them both and laughing through a dead mouth, asking, “Am I done yet? Are any of us done yet? Will she be here soon? Is she getting hungry too?”
It had occurred to him that there were so many stories concerning instant conversions, from Paul onward. The Church reveled in them. Yet there must be some counterbalance to these: events, sights, sounds, perhaps even an odor that, in an instant, destroyed a lifetime’s faith. How many Catholics had walked into Belsen and walked out atheists? How many, on a more mundane level, had felt some darkness enter their soul while walking down the street, put one foot in front of the other and found their previously held beliefs had vanished forever? That they had lost twice over, had spent half their life in ignorance and would spend the rest in the solitary despair of knowing there was no salvation and never had been?
He looked again. There was no cardinal roasting slowly on the rack. Only the rat, darting across the iron bars, bright eyes glittering back at him in the darkness.
A rat could steal away the last few remnants of your faith, snatch it from your mouth, then shred it to pieces with its sharp, sharp teeth, slowly, silently in some dark, dusty corner away from the sight of man. It was always the small things, the unexpected things, which would kill you.
Recollecting all this with a grim precision, Gino Fosse shook his head, wishing the memories would disappear forever. They clouded his judgment. They stole from him his determination. There was no time for thinking, only action. He’d just killed two cops, something he’d never envisaged when this began. There would be repercussions. This was, he thought, the precursor to the end. Events were circling around him like crows eyeing a coming meal. Within the next twenty-four hours, everything could surely be accomplished. It was a welcoming thought. He was growing tired of the game. He was impatient for its inevitable resolution.
How quickly that happened depended on what he did next. Denney had proved himself a stubborn man, unwilling to run, to let himself be exposed to risk, in the face of the most severe provocation. There had to be a final exertion, a turn in the savagery none of them expected.
Gino Fosse rubbed off the white makeup, as much as he could. He wore his old clothes again: jeans and a black T-shirt. He was sweating like a pig. The night was unbearably close. The city felt like an oven. He felt conspicuous, as if the darkness were full of eyes, glittering rodent eyes, greedy human ones, glancing feverishly in his direction. He stuck his head outside the van window. The piazza was empty. A few lone figures wandered down the Via Corso, past the shuttered shops and the flashing neon signs in the windows.
He picked up the sack of keys he had stolen six days before from the administration office in the Vatican when he called to pick up the rest of his belongings. He sorted through them until he found the set marked for the church. He had reversed the van so that the rear door was tight against the locked entrance into the building. No one would see Arturo Valena being dragged inside. Behind those heavy wooden doors, in this deserted part of the city, no one would hear what then ensued.
48
They stood in the corridor on the landing, unable to find the words. Bea was quiet downstairs now. The house was silent, filled with some strange happiness, an oasis of sanity hidden from the sight of the hard, bleak world beyond the gates. Sara thought of the other times; how she had allowed herself to be used, how her own desires were always secondary to theirs.
Then, gingerly, she walked up to him and looked into his eyes. Was there fear in them? Perhaps, but not doubt. He had stepped beyond its reach. Something had happened in the old farm that night, moving them all: Bea, in her search for love before it disappeared, Marco, in his quest for some meaning in this fast-diminishing period of life which remained to him. She too had been touched by their closeness, their frank questions and answers. This was so unlike the world she had inhabited before. Here no one asked for anything except her presence and understanding. This small, enclosed universe—and Nic Costa—existed now for her satisfaction, to do with as she wished.
Sara Farnese reached out, touched his hair, waiting, mouth tentatively open, for his kiss. He hesitated. She brought her lips up to his, felt his response, letting her tongue wander into his mouth, touch the wetness there, feeling the outline of his teeth. His hand came behind her back, strong, determined, and moved below to her thighs, gripping them. In a single powerful movement he lifted her from the ground. Her legs wound around his waist. She tore at his hair, kissed him hard and deep.
Then he carried her purposefully into the bedroom, let her legs slip to the floor and slowly, nervously, with no small wonder, they undressed each other, coming to stand naked by the bed, breathless, full of anticipation.
Again he hesitated.
“Nic,” she whispered.
His dark eyes tried to look inside her, beyond the surface he scarcely knew. “And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I plant seeds for your father,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation.
She looked at the bathroom and the small marble shower in the corner.
“Here,” she said, taking him by the hand.
He followed her into the cubicle. She turned on the water, letting it run down on their heads, soaking their hair, stone cold at first, then lukewarm.
He laughed.
She took the liquid and began working it into his soft white skin. His head came down to her neck. His lips closed gently on a nipple. Her face arched upward, teeth clenched, charged by a new and sudden determination in his grip. She felt his hardness, reached down, let her fingers run up and down its length and leaned back against the cold wet tiles, opening her legs, guiding him.
For a minute, no more, he entered her, making a few measured strokes, shallow at first, then gradually deeper until she clung to him, hand tight in the back of his head, legs wrapped around his back.
She sighed, anguished, as he withdrew. Nic led her to the bed, watched as she spread herself across the white coverlet, beckoning. His head went down, his teeth suckled briefly at her breasts and moved on to probe her navel. Her breath caught and shortened to brief snatches. This too was new to her. In the past she had always been the one to serve, who sought to deliver satisfaction. Nic seemed determined to deliver that gift to her. His tongue licked lower, pressed beyond her hair, found her widening, warm crevice, entered fully, writhing inside with a powerful, muscular intent. She held his scalp, forced him down further into her, arching her back, wishing she could open herself so wide he might be consumed in the rich fleshy dampness of her sex. Then, with a certain, relentless rhythm, he began to work upon the smallest, sweetest part of her, raising its tumescence until her head had lost all reasoning, her mind knew nothing but the fiery delight he brought. And at this last gasping moment he revealed another secret too: His little finger sought another entry, pressed insistently from a second direction so that these secret, private doors to her ecstasy became a single coursing torrent of wild and shapeless pleasure.
And then he paused, rising from the bed to peer at the pale, lovely body on the sheets, as surprised by himself as he was by her. She laughed, wiped away the sweat from her brow, then cupped his face with her hands. His fingers moved across her cheek. She sucked greedily on the tips, tasting herself on the skin and the nails. He moved onto her. She lifted her legs, placed her feet around his back, gripping him, tugging him, demanding more, taking him into her with anxious fingers.
He hesitated again, waiting in front of the unfolding entrance like an uninvited guest unsure of his welcome. Then she held him more tightly and the game ended. In the small bedroom of the farmhouse off the Appian Way, where Nic Costa had turned from boy to m
an, where his personality had been forged, through happiness and pain, the oldest ceremony of all was enacted with joy, enacted again and again until a sated exhaustion took them into a sleep undisturbed by dreams, untainted by the memory of a fallen world beyond the open window and the vine-twisted veranda.
49
Arturo Valena stumbled out of the back of the van, grateful to leave the dogs behind. He sniffed the petrol-stained breeze from the Via Corso hopefully, then screeched in terror and pain as Fosse struck him a hard blow on the side of the head with the butt of the gun.
That was a mistake. Fosse was shocked by his carelessness. He’d half hoped the fat man would fall to the floor unconscious, making what came next easier. It was stupid. He should have realized this before the attempt. Valena was too heavy to be manhandled around a quiet piazza just a few yards from a street that still had its stragglers, even after midnight.
Fosse watched the fat man reeling in pain, wondering whether to run perhaps, and forced himself to think. Then he hit him once again, in the same place but with a little less force, waved the gun in his face and hissed at him to go to the church railings. Fosse had the keys in the small shoulder bag he’d brought with him from the van. He knew the place: where the light switches were. And where to find the instruments for the rest of the artistry.
Valena complied, shambling the few yards to the entrance. Fosse fumbled at the lock, opened the gate and pushed the terrified man through into the gloom of the portico. In the space of a minute he had unlocked the door to the church, sent Valena in and set the lights to low.
They stood in the nave, Fosse unable to detach his attention from the small chapel on the right which Brendan Hanrahan had revealed to him. Somewhere beyond the low, glittering frame of the iron grill a tiny voice squeaked. Fosse wished he could see them, not just hear their scuttering in the dark corners: tiny feet running, going nowhere, just like him. In his mind’s eye he could imagine their yellow rodent teeth, ready to snatch away his soul the moment he faltered. He could picture their bright eyes glittering, the color of polished jet. In those black pupils stood another universe, a black one that went on forever, in time, in every direction, an endless place that could swallow up an entire world and still leave space for millions more.
Valena was trembling, holding himself by a pew. His face was a waxy yellow under the lights and there was an unmistakable flicker of hope there. His abductor had hesitated. Something had spooked him. Perhaps there was a chance.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice husky with pain. “Money?”
“Just you,” Fosse said flatly.
Valena’s piggy eyes glistened, damp and pathetic. “I never did anything to you. I never hurt anyone.”
“It’s the not doing that counts,” Fosse said. “You can go to Hell just as easily for your omissions as your deeds. Didn’t they tell you that? Didn’t you even begin to suspect?”
Valena fell to his knees, clasped his hands. “I’m just a stupid old man,” he pleaded. “What do you want with me?”
“Your life.”
“Please . . .” His voice rose with that, turning almost into a squeal. It sounded like a rat. It sounded like the end of everything.
“Don’t pray to me. Pray to Him. And pray for yourself.”
The fat man sobbed. He closed his eyes. His lips moved, fleshy, blubbery lips, a mouth that had once caressed Sara Farnese. Gino Fosse knew that. He’d been the driver that night. He’d taken the photographs. It was one more stain to erase, one more station of grief along the way.
He reached into the bag and took out the pack he’d stolen from the hospital. The hypodermic was ready. The liquid trembled in the barrel. He walked behind the praying Valena and stabbed him hard in the upper arm. The fat man scrambled up, screeching.
“What are you fucking doing?” His eyes were burning black coals, full of hatred and pain. “For the love of God . . .”
“Be grateful,” Fosse said. “Hope it lasts.”
They danced slowly around each other for a time. He wasn’t letting the fat man make for the door. Eventually Valena’s eyes started to turn dull.
“What?” He swayed once. Then his pupils rolled upward into his head. His large frame collapsed like a building that had suddenly lost its foundation. Gino Fosse looked at the pile of humanity that lay on the marble floor, no more than ten yards from Lorenzo’s altar.
The drug was the easiest option. There was much preparation to be done to achieve the required effect. This would be the last before the final deed. He knew that somehow.
He bent down over the unconscious Valena and began to tug at his clothing. Five minutes later the TV man was naked on the tiles of the church. He’d pissed himself at some point. Fosse was disgusted but not surprised. Ordinary men feared death, failing to understand the need for the transformation. They lacked the sense and the courage to greet it smiling, to welcome its inevitable embrace.
He turned Valena to face the small altar in the chapel. With an effort he dragged the iron grill into the nave. It was cold and shiny to the touch, polished for centuries, a perfect instrument, alive with its past. Perhaps the story of Lorenzo’s martyrdom was apocryphal. To Fosse it seemed irrelevant. So many people had come to believe in it that this elaborate construction of iron, with its curlicues and its flamboyant grating, became what they imagined: the gateway to Paradise, the ultimate redemption. Even Arturo Valena deserved that.
Gino Fosse fetched the kindling, the charcoal and the petrol, and decided, at this point, that he must cease deluding himself. He’d learned enough in the hospital to understand how long the shot would keep Valena unconscious. Fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, no more. Arturo Valena would not sleep his way to judgment.
50
A noise woke her: the sound of a dog barking from some distant farm. He stood at the window, with his back to her, staring out into the blackness of the night, silhouetted against the moon. She glanced at the clock on the stand. It was nearly two.
“What’s wrong?” she asked softly.
He didn’t even turn around.
“Nic? Look at me.”
He sighed and returned to sit on the bed. In the cold light that fell through the window his face wore the same hard expression she had seen when they first met. This was serious Nic, tough Nic, a man who preferred duty over passion. A man who feared anything that might disrupt an ordered, logical world.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was too soon. I should have stopped myself.”
He stared down at the sheets and said nothing.
She took his chin with her hand, made him look at her. “Don’t sit in judgment on me.”
He scowled. “I didn’t want this to happen. I promised myself I wouldn’t allow it.”
“And I made you? Is that it?”
“No. Of course not.” He meant what he said, although there was no comfort in his sincerity. “But that doesn’t make it right.”
“It felt right to me,” she replied icily.
That touched him. He reached out and held her hand. “It felt right to me too. But Sara . . .”
The words ran dry. His reticence annoyed her. “What?”
“I don’t know you. Not really. Just a side of you. There’s still something missing, something important in your life you don’t want me to see.”
She withdrew from his grasp. “Haven’t you seen enough?”
“No. Because what I know doesn’t add up and that just makes everything worse. There’s something else. Something you won’t disclose. Something you’re keeping from me, still, and I can’t bear the thought because without that piece of knowledge I feel I don’t really know you at all. It just . . . tortures me.”
“Listen to the cop inside you talking. Am I supposed to be more frank after you’ve screwed me?”
“No!” His voice almost broke. She recognized the truth in what he said and despised herself for doubting him. Nic was honest, too honest perhaps.
She came closer to him, p
ut her hand to his face, stared into his eyes. “I’m sorry. That was just the fear in me talking. This is hard for me too, you know.”
“Is it? You’ve a capacity for keeping things inside. I never learned that.”
“I asked if you’d come off this case for me. I begged. You still can.”
“It’s impossible. This is my job. It’s what I do.”
“Then maybe this is what I do too. Maybe this is who I am. Just someone who sleeps around and then goes on somewhere else, not remembering, not caring. What’s wrong with that? Is it a sin just because you don’t think that way?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s a sin because you don’t. This person you’re trying to paint for me is someone you created and I need to know why.”
“Trust me. You don’t need that.”
He put his arms around her shoulders. He kissed her lightly on the mouth, then stroked her hair. “I woke up with the taste of you. I can smell you in my head. Don’t take this lightly. It doesn’t happen to me.”
The first sign of dampness appeared at the corner of her eye. He wiped it away with a finger and placed the tip in his own mouth, tasting the salt of her, as if it were some precious fluid.
She closed her eyes. The tears ran freely down her cheeks.
“Tell me,” he murmured.
She wiped her face with her arm, then gathered up the sheet around her, ready to leave the room.
“Tell you, Nic? I’ll tell you. I promise. When Michael Denney is out of the Vatican and gone from Italy. There. Is that what you want to hear?”
It was the last response he was expecting. No words formed in his head, only thoughts and images of Sara with the old, gray man trapped behind those distant walls in the ancient city.
“No,” he said finally, with a bitterness which surprised him.
She got up from the bed, clutching the sheet to her body. “Then I’m sorry but it’s true. And you’ll hear nothing more from me, not a word, until that’s happened.”
